A heat wave that has stifled the southern tier of the U.S. for weeks has expanded into the Plains, Midwest and now the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Thursday, triggering heat alerts for over 227 million people, according to the National Weather Service.

  • FlickOfTheBean@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Huh this is the first thing I’ve read that puts it into a sort of understandable perspective (eternally recovering from my conservative raised childhood, maybe sane people explain it better in general)

    • If you want a feeling for how your local temperatures will change you can extrapolate the peaks linearly. So if we look at London Uk as an Example https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0394/production/_125961900_optimised-max_temp_uk-nc-002.png.webp

      With a global mean temperature increase of 1 C since 1970 there was an increase in peak temperatures (avg) of about 2 C. So till 2050 it will be somewhere around 3 C for the average peak in summer. If we look at the ramp up since 2008 we can expect more like 5-6 C higher temperature records than today. So in the 2050s there will be some summers with 45 C records and the average hottest day every year around 35-37 C

      Edit: and not to forget that this is only talking about how high the peaks every year are. The length of heatwaves will also increase by a few days. So where it was maybe 32 for three days and then 35 for one day, followed by a cooling thunderstorm it will be more like five days of 35 followed by a day of 37 and then a much more intense thunderstorm than what we know today.